Should you target when advertising on Facebook or not? This is a question that many people are still wondering about, especially at a time when social media is an excellent marketing tool for businesses today. How should you target to achieve the best effectiveness and save costs for your business? Let’s explore this factor below.
1. What is Facebook Targeting?
Facebook targeting essentially means identifying one or more target audience groups when running ads on this platform. With over 60 million users today, if you do not specify who can see your posts or videos, the ads won’t know whom to distribute to, resulting in extremely high costs.
Targeting plays the role of delivering ads to the right potential customers, those who like and are interested in the company’s products or services. Some suggestions to define Facebook targeting include demographics, age, behavior, interests, location, occupation, etc. From there, you can create a detailed audience profile, narrow the reach, save budget, and ensure high effectiveness.
2. Should You Target When Advertising on Facebook?
Facebook is currently the largest social network with a huge number of users. However, we cannot guarantee that all the information users declare on their profiles is accurate.
If you don’t target, it’s like you are spreading your budget thinly for Facebook to serve as a service and find customers for you. Artificial intelligence will read the information, but initially, it won’t have time to understand what you are selling or what kind of customers you want to find. Therefore, Facebook will distribute ads evenly, analyze which audience interacts most, and then focus on that audience.
Thus, in the early stage, it’s like you are throwing money at Facebook to run the entire system. However, the cost in this case is very cheap and the reach is very broad.
For industries or products that are mass-market and where anyone can be a potential customer, you should not target too narrowly. Because this makes advertising costs very high and sometimes ineffective. Conversely, if you are selling niche, high-value, or specialized products, you should choose more detailed targeting.
3. Five Most Effective Ways to Target on Facebook Ads
Whether you should target when advertising on Facebook has been answered in the information above. To help you find suitable target audiences, we introduce 5 methods. Let’s take a look:
Targeting by Not Targeting
With this “no-targeting” ad approach, Facebook will automatically distribute your ad content randomly to users the system sees as potential. Don’t worry, because with the huge number of users nowadays, this feature has been tested by the social network and shown to be effective to some extent.
Facebook will rely on data it has collected to deliver your ads to potential customers based on behavior, psychology, interests, and more. However, this does not mean you should leave all settings at their widest default targeting. Doing so will definitely cause your business costs to become unsustainable.
Before running Facebook ads with a no-targeting approach, you still need to check and decide to narrow down the audience scope to avoid waste. For example, limit by geographic area, age range, or gender. Run the ads for a while, then adjust the potential customer audience accordingly.
Using Facebook Audience Insights
Facebook Audience Insights is a highly effective targeting tool provided by Facebook itself to support advertisers in precise audience targeting. It is considered one of the most effective targeting methods.
To use Facebook Audience Insights, you need to access Facebook Ads Manager under the Plan section.
Inside, you will see tables displaying Facebook user data or those connected to your page. Charts and statistics show comprehensive information about age, gender, location, characteristics, and other connections. With this simple trick, you can easily research and create detailed customer profiles.
Using the left-side toolbar, you can filter, classify, and evaluate suitable audience groups for your ads. Filter by interests, location, age, and find the most influential targets to compete effectively with rivals.
Targeting by Demographics
Should you target when advertising on Facebook? One of the key suggestions for defining your target audience is demographics: age, geography, relationship status, and so on.
Age
Each age group exhibits different behaviors and attitudes toward various product categories. Based on these characteristics, we can segment customers into the following groups:
- Age group 18–22: Mostly students and low-income workers, trendsetters who quickly catch on to viral trends.
- Age group 23–25: Young professionals who have started working but have unstable income, spend a lot of time online, have average spending power, and mainly shop online.
- Age group 26–30: Established workers with stable income, capable of purchasing premium and high-end products.
- Age group 31–40: Users in this group have a higher standard of living, disposable income, tend to buy more, and pay more attention to product quality.
- Age group 40 and above: Spend less time on the internet, have lower interaction rates, but still maintain relatively high purchasing demand.
Geographic Location
Urban areas tend to have higher purchasing demand than rural areas. Advertisers promoting high-cost products or focusing on a narrow market segment should pay close attention to this targeting factor. You can pin specific locations, mark them, or exclude certain areas on Facebook’s built-in map tool.
Relationship Status
You can also find your target customers based on their relationship status. Using marital status allows you to select or exclude groups that may not have demand for your product. For example, products or services for newborns are suitable for people who are married and exclude those under 18 years old.
Based on Lookalike Audience
Facebook Lookalike Audiences consist of people who share similar interests and behaviors with your existing customer base. This is a way to scale potential audiences with a high conversion rate.
With Lookalike Audiences, advertisers do not need to know the core data they want to target. Facebook’s system automatically works by using algorithms to generate an effective audience segment.
The Lookalike Audiences feature is located in Facebook Ads Manager. You select Audiences, then click Create a Lookalike Audience, and choose the source audience and the region you want to target. This completes the creation of your Lookalike Audience.
Target remarketing
Should you target when advertising on Facebook? Is remarketing really effective? Remarketing is a highly powerful and effective Facebook targeting strategy.
Essentially, it targets a highly potential audience who have previously shown interest or engagement with your products or services. Very few users make a purchase immediately upon first seeing an ad, which is why you need to retarget them.
Through this article, you should now have clear answers on whether to target when advertising on Facebook, the most effective and cost-efficient targeting methods, and how to increase revenue. Consider and apply these methods when implementing campaigns on this social media platform.